Taughannock Falls

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Henry Giroux has been a strong advocate for defending high-quality public education from the profiteering privatizers here in the U.S. Here he argues that only a free and independent citizenry, educated outside of the corporate sphere of influence, will be able to reclaim our democracy.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page4/cultures_of_violence_in_the_age_of_casino_capitalism_20131219

As power becomes global, unrestrained by the politics of nation states, it has become more arrogant, less controllable and more vicious in its pursuit of resources, profits and wealth. This predatory ruling financial class are the new zombies - parasites sucking the blood out of everything they come in contact with while spreading misery, suffering, and death all over the globe. One consequence is that more and more individuals and groups are becoming imaginary others, defined by a free floating, largely unaccountable capitalist class that inscribes them as disposable, redundant and irrelevant….
This grim reality has produced a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy. Casino capitalism destroys those institutions that generate the capacity for critique, dissent, thoughtfulness and collective struggles. In its place, it has erected a series of cultural apparatuses that revel in idiocy, celebrity culture, conformity and infantilization….
The struggle against casino capitalism must begin as not only a struggle over power, but as a concerted and widespread attempt to make education central to politics, to address what it means to change the way in which people see things, learn how to govern rather than be governed, and embrace a collective sense of agency in which history and the future is open.blockquote>